The study of religious or heroic legends and tales. One constant rule of mythology is that whatever happens amongst the gods or other mythical beings was in one sense or another a reflection of events on earth. Recorded myths and legends, perhaps preserved in literature or folklore, have an immediate interest to archaeology in trying to unravel the nature and meaning of ancient events and traditions.

Ish:
It is not just Newtonian physics that has blinded us in this day.
It is the common corner street light.
I doubt you can find a current urban dweller that even knows what the Big Dipper is, let alone be able to tell you how to find it.
(I will give you a hint. You go out in the dark and look up.)
In this day of instant communication, when things 24 hours old are “so yesterday,” the concept of something 25,000 years plus in scope is beyond us.

Dec. 11, 2007: NASA's fleet of THEMIS spacecraft, launched less than eight months ago, has made three important discoveries about spectacular eruptions of Northern Lights called "substorms" and the source of their power. The discoveries include giant magnetic ropes that connect Earth's upper atmosphere to the Sun and explosions in the outskirts of Earth's magnetic field.

"The mission is only beginning but THEMIS is already surprising us," says Vassilis Angelopoulos the mission's principal investigator at the University of California, Los Angeles....

... "The satellites have found evidence for magnetic ropes connecting Earth's upper atmosphere directly to the Sun," says Dave Sibeck, project scientist for the mission at the Goddard Space Flight Center. "We believe that solar wind particles flow in along these ropes, providing energy for geomagnetic storms and auroras."

A "magnetic rope" is a twisted bundle of magnetic fields organized much like the twisted hemp of a mariner's rope.

[do they mean this? - Ish]

[The article goes on ...]

Spacecraft have detected hints of these ropes before, but a single spacecraft is insufficient to map their 3D structure. THEMIS's five satellites were able to perform the feat.

"THEMIS encountered its first magnetic rope on May 20, 2007," says Sibeck. "It was very large, about as wide as Earth, and located approximately 40,000 miles above Earth's surface in a region called the magnetopause." The magnetopause is where the solar wind and Earth's magnetic field meet and push against one another like sumo wrestlers locked in combat. There, the rope formed and unraveled in just a few minutes, providing a brief but significant conduit for solar wind energy. Other ropes quickly followed: "They seem to occur all the time," says Sibeck.

Wherever we end up with our understanding about gravity (and I think it’s a theory that will change radically over the next century) it must be the case that magnetism is far more powerful in relation to the Earth. If we put a steel ball bearing on a table, yes, it will stay there – due to the power of gravity. But if we then put a magnet above it ... ‘snap!’, and gravity is rendered useless.

So it must be with our Earth, which just happens to have a humungous iron ball bearing slap bang in the middle of it.

Here's an artist's impression, based on scientific observations of how electromagnetic fields that are projected from the Sun support the Earth:

I believe that the ancients understood the relationship of iron to magnetisim, which is why - long before the discovery of smeltable telluric iron that led to the Iron Age - they revered hematite and ‘celestial iron’, that is iron that fell in the form of meteorites from the heavens, 'the realm of the gods'.

The earliest word (Sumerian) for iron is AN.BAR, which is made up of the pictograms ‘sky’ and ‘fire’.

These meteorites were naturally etched with geometrical patterns — interwoven bands of kamacite and taenite that form over millions of years of cooling. You can see these etchings on this iron meteorite from Chihuahua, Mexico which, significantly, was found in an ancient tomb:

Possibly this is why Neolithic man copied these geometric patterns, as we shown in this 77,000 year-old man-etched piece of hematite found in a cave in southern Africa. These identical patterns are also seen at Stage One of the shamanic trance.

This is an extract from The Forge and the Crucible by Mircea Eliade:

We shall do well to bear in mind the early religious significance attached to aeroliths. They fall to earth charged with celestial sanctity; in a way, they represent heaven. This would suggest why meteorites were worshipped or identified with a deity. The faithful saw in them the ‘first form’, the immediate manifestation of the godhead. The Palladium of Troy was supposed to have dropped from heaven, and ancient writers saw it as the statue of the goddess Athena.

A celestial origin was also accorded to the statue of Artemis at Ephesus and to the cone of Heliogabalus at Emesus (Herodian v, 3, 5). The meteorite at Pessinus in Phyrgia was venerated as the image of Cybele and, following an injunction by the Delphic Oracle, it was transported to Rome shortly after the Second Punic War....

Aphrodite meterorite of Paphos, Cyprus

Eliade continues:

But the heavenly, and hence masculine, essence of meteorites is none the less beyond dispute, for certain silex and Neolithic tools were subsequently given names like ‘thunderstones’, ‘thunderbolt teeth’ or ‘God’s axes’. The sites where they were found were thought to have been struck by a thunderbolt, which is the weapon of the god of heaven. When this god was ousted by the god of the storms, the thunderbolt became the sign of the sacred union between the god of the hurricane and the goddess earth.

This may account for the large number of double axes discovered in the period in the clefts and caves of Crete.

These axes, like the thunderbolt and the meteorites, ‘cleaved’ the earth – in other words, they symbolised the union between heaven and earth. Delphi, most famous of the clefts of ancient Greece, owed its name to this mythical image: ‘delphi’ in fact, signifies the female generative organ ... Plato reminds us that, in the matter of conception, it is the woman who imitates the earth and not the earth the woman.

Eliade goes on:

Primitive peoples worked with meteoric iron for a long time before learning how to use ferrous ores. It is known, moreover, that prehistoric peoples, before the discovery of smelting, treated certain ores as if they were stones, that is, they looked upon them as raw materials for the making of stone tools. A similar technique was applied until recently by certain peoples having no knowledge of metallurgy; they worked the meteorite with silex hammers and fashioned objects whose shape resembled, in all respects, their stone models.

This is how the Greenland Eskimos made their knives out of meteoric iron. When Cortez enquired of the Aztec chiefs how they obtained their knives, they simply pointed to the sky.

Like the Mayas of the Yucatan and the Incas of Peru, the Aztecs only used meteoric iron, which they rated higher than gold. They knew nothing about the smelting of ores....

Aztec weapons

Eliade's book, The Forge and the Crucible traces the history of iron through to the alchemists of the Middle Ages.

But I would go further than Eliade, who was writing at the beginning of the 20th century, in his view that iron was worshipped just because it fell from the sky gods. My own view is that it was much more than that – and that it is bound up with Neolithic’s man understanding about the universe and our Earth (as well as the other planets') dependence on iron interacting with electromagnetism, which was later personified by the MAGna Mater (c. 200 BC in Rome) and Mary MAGdELene:

History suggests that the celebration of the Magna Mater is the oldest known religious cult in the world.

From six thousand years we find Magna Mater known by various images and by various names, but in each situation, she is known for one common attribute: "The Mother of the Gods". She was known as Cybele in the region of the Aegean Sea, Damkina, Goddess of Fecundity to the Babylonians... fecundity referring to her 'marriage with the earth and sky'. Among the Euphrates she was called Koubaba, in Greece, Gaia or Gheea "Mother Earth". She was known as Terra, from the Latin 'Terra Mater', the goddess of miners in the Eastern area of Europe. Egyptians called her Isis; in Akkadia her name was Ishtar.

Magna Mater transcends world history: her mysteries and many presentations have inspired poets and artists, simple mortals or kings, with many kings dedicating her temples in great number. For many religions she is eternal, existing from the beginning of time, the bearer of the world and all life populating this planet (plants, animals and humans). The Romans identified this Goddess with the Greek Rhea, and gave her the name Magna Mater, the Great Mother.

Interesting little nugget - no pun intended. The Romans always took hematite into battle with them. They believed it brought them luck as it was associated with Mars the god of war. Silly superstition? Well, possibly ... but then, when the first probes got up to Mars in 2001, what did they find? That the whole planet was covered in hematite.

It is not just Newtonian physics that has blinded us in this day. It is the common corner street light. I doubt you can find a current urban dweller that even knows what the Big Dipper is, let alone be able to tell you how to find it. (I will give you a hint. You go out in the dark and look up.) In this day of instant communication, when things 24 hours old are “so yesterday,” the concept of something 25,000 years plus in scope is beyond us.

Good point, KB. I remember as a child how excited we all were while sleeping outdoors at night since we could look at the stars. Of course, the Big Dipper was the most important formation in the sky. That sense of awe and wonder is lost in today's adult society to our detriment.

Ishtar wrote:

But we have lost more than we realise. We now see ourselves as separate to all that it is, instead of an integral part of it.

Conversely, when we have those fleeting moments where "out there" and "in here" merge, the experience is life altering. Some use drugs to achieve that mental state, others train themselves, and yet others stumble upon altered reality quite by accident. I think I am in the third category.

Cognito wrote:Conversely, when we have those fleeting moments where "out there" and "in here" merge, the experience is life altering. Some use drugs to achieve that mental state, others train themselves, and yet others stumble upon altered reality quite by accident. I think I am in the third category.

Cogs, I don't want to worry you, but the third kind is how shamans have traditionally been trained for thousands upon thousands of years. What appears to be 'stumbling upon altered reality quite by accident' in the end turns out not be an accident at all - but a carefully choreographed plan by the spirits to start training the adept. Only they don't tell you about it.

This is confirmed in Mircea Eliade's book Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy which I've mentioned on this board many times - it is a scholarly collation of anthropologists' accounts of their interviews with shamans from all over the world, recorded at the turn of the 19th and 20th century.

When Eliade, the late professor of the History of Religion at Harvard, put this book together in 1951, and published it in French, it was the first indication the modern world had that shamans from far flung parts of the globe all reported the same core experiences, and so then anthropologists began to take them more seriously.

This book is the ultimate book for understanding the beliefs and practices of Shamanism, written by one of the world's foremost experts on religion and sociology. I cannot stress to you enough how thoroughly Eliade manages to cover the subject. A good portion of the book focuses on the Shamanic traditions of Siberia and Central Asia, the heartlands of Shamanism. Amongst the Mongols, Yakut, Chuckchi, Saami (Lapps) and other people of that region Shamanism was first observed, and is stil practiced today in many regions. Eliade goes into great depth about the beliefs and symbolism, about the clothing and ornamentation, about the meaning of ritual tools and amulets and much more. Everything from the axis mundi to ecstasy and trance states to helper spirits to Shamanic ideas of death and illness is covered in superb detail. But Eliade goes far beyond a simple survey of Shamanic beliefs and practices, almost literally taking you into the world of the Shaman. After reading this book, you will understand the Shamanic mindset and world view far more than you ever thought.

And, as I said, Eliade goes far beyond the traditional forms of Shamanism in Siberia and Central Asia. In this encyclopedic work, Eliade explores the Shamanic traditions of the Americas (North and South), Australia, Indonesia, Oceania, Tibet, China and beyond. Even the Shamanic traditions of the ancient Indo-Euorpeans, such as the Greek myth of Orpheus, Persian views of the after world and the Germanic God Odin, are given treatment.

This book is very lengthy, well written, extensivily bibliographed and filled with detailed accounts and accurate information on virtually all facets of Shamanism. I cannot recommend this book enough. Even after all these years, "Shamanism" remains perhaps the definitive book on Shamanic beliefs and thought. To truely understand Shamanism and its role in Siberia/Central Asia, you must read this book.

Anyway, in this book, trainee shamans from India and Siberia, Australia and South America to Malaysia to Tibet, all say the same thing to the anthropologists about how they were selected for training - not by the shamans, but by the spirits, who started giving them experiences before they even knew what these experiences were.

I'm a very organised person and it's one of the things I've found quite challenging about this path. I like things to be done properly, in a nice orderly fashion. Usually in life it's: 1. You decide to do something. 2. You go and sign up for the training. 3. They teach you the theory. 4. You pass the exam in it and only then 5. You do the practical.

But in this case, everything is not only taught back to front but also inside out. So you can spend the first eight years not realising that you're already on the path and wondering why all this strange stuff is happening. Then you realise, so you sign up for a course and in your very first lesson, before they've even taught you about the landscapes of the upper and lower worlds, you walk straight into the Realms of the Dead. Well, that's what happened to me. Don't get me wrong - the Realms of the Dead sounds like something out of a horror film. They're not. It's an incredibly beautiful and loving place - much better than here, in fact. But still, I didn't find out that that's where I'd been - the Realms of the Dead, that is - until we got to the class about being psychopomps 18 months later.

In the end, I left the course prematurely because my spirits were pulling me in one direction and the course was going in another. So here I am, twelve years after my first shamanic experience, and still an apprentice shaman but with no (human) shaman to train me. I am now taught solely by the spirits... and I haven't a clue what we're going to do next. But at least I no longer stumble upon altered reality experiences by 'accident' - instead, I walk in willingly.

Never mind, Cogs. Lessons are about to get a bit more interesting. We're going to be talking about sex today ... and I hope no-one's going to get embarrassed.

This schizophrenic prudish/prurient attitude that we, as a civilisation, have about sexual matters is actually quite new. We were a little more ribald in Chaucer’s time. But the Victorians took sexual puritanism to its apogee. And even now — some 40 years after the so-called sexual revolution of the Sixties — sex is still a subject for tittering about behind hands and it remains the law that you can only have sex with certain, designated people and only then if they don’t have a headache.

So once again, our natural birthright is taken from us only to be sold back to us in the form of red light districts and porn, which, in its internet media format, is the fastest growing industry in the world.

"They paved paradise, and they put up a parking lot."

However, long before the parking lot was built, the ancients had a deeper and wiser understanding about how vital and intrinsic fertility was. For centuries anthropologists have told us that ancient fertility rites were all about praying for a good harvest. But the narrowness of that vision only reflected the obsession of our own society - consumerism. The mental horizons of the ancients were far broader and those fertility rites were actually, in fact, about nothing less than the universe generating and regenerating itself - through the act of sex.

In the Vedas, these fertility rites were known as the 'asvamedha', and the Egyptians called it the 'maithuna'. The sex act that took place within these rites was a microcosmic enactment of the macrocosmic act that guaranteed the 'covenant', i.e. the continuance of the universe.

Comet fertilising Mars

Sperm fertilising egg

Most scientists see matter, like the planets and stars, as inert and dead - whether its solid, liquid or gaseous matter. But shamans — and others with a different perception — see everything as if it’s alive and vibrant, and madly interacting all the time, like lit-up guests at a cocktail party. And just like anything that’s alive, in order to regenerate so that its nature can survive in its existing format, it needs to ... well, have sex.

So despite how ever many laws we pass on the subject, or how ever much we insist on dressing our women from head to toe in bhurkas, sex is going on around us all the time — whether we like it or not.

Not only is it taking place in the pollination and cross fertilisation of the green bit we've roped off and labelled like a museum exhibit as 'Nature'. This sexual intercourse is also taking place in a much greater arena - in the interplay of masculine and feminine energies, of the yin and yang dance of electromagnetism that supports this creation.

According to mythology, it all began with the egg:

The cosmogonies of many ancient civilisations stem from an egg, or the mundane egg at it’s known — although heaven knows why as there’s nothing mundane about it. This egg was often laid on the ‘primordial waters’. (The primordial waters appear in most civilisations’ creation mythologies, including Genesis where God apparently said: ‘let there by space within the water and let it separate between water and water.’)

It's also in the much older Indian Vedas:

“From these seven principles ... an egg arose. This universal egg, or the universe in the shape of an egg, is called the manifestation of material energy. Its layers of water, air, fire, sky and ego and maha-tattva increases in thickness one after the other. Each layer is ten times bigger than the previous one, and the final outside one is covered by pradhana. Within this egg is the universal form of Lord Hari, of whose body the fourteen planetary systems are parts.”
Srimad Bhagavatham, Canto 3, Chapter 26, v.51-52

And in Mespotamia:

“An egg of wondrous size is said to have fallen from heaven into the river Euphrates. The fishes rolled it to the bank, where the doves having settled upon it, and hatched it, out came Venus, who afterwards was called the Syrian Goddess-that is, Astarte. Hence, the egg became one of the symbols of Astarte or Easter."

http://www.northvegr.org/lore/serpent/00403.phpThe vivification of the Mundane Egg is allegorically represented in the temple of Daibod, in Japan, by a nest egg, which is shown floating in an expanse of waters against which a bulb (everywhere an emblem of generative energy, and prolific heat, the Sun) is striking with his horns.

Near Lemisso, in the Island of Cyprus, is still to be seen a gigantic egg-shaped vase, which is supposed to represent the Mundane or Orphic Egg. It is of stone, and measures thirty feet in circumference. Upon one side, in a semi-circular niche, is sculptured a bull, the emblem of productive energy.

...Many other nations of the ancient world, the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Phœnicians, and the Indo-Scythiac nations of Europe participated. They not only supported the propriety of the allegory ... from the perfection of its external form, but fancifully extended the allusion to its interior composition, comparing the pure white shell to the fair expanse of heaven; the fluid, transparent white, to the circumambient air, and the more solid yolk to the central earth.

Even the Polynesians entertained the same general notions. The tradition of the Sandwich Islanders is that a bird (with them it is an emblem of Deity) laid an egg upon the waters, which burst of itself and produced the Islands.

So that’s the cosmogonic egg – but then where is the cosmogonic sperm to fertilise the cosmogonic egg?

It’s the wily old serpent, of course.

The BCE Phoenician author Sanchoniathon tells us that the Egyptians placed the god Kneph as a serpent in the centre of a symbol of the universe shown as an egg.

Ohio Serpent Mound showing egg and serpent

Here's another way of looking at the same thing:

We’ve seen in previous posts how electromagnetic energy within space coils itself around, like two serpents.

This interplay of energies is also shown in the mythology of the Vedics, the Egyptians and the Mayans by the same common myth – the churning of the cosmic mill by the opposing forces of the good spirits (devas) and bad spirits (demons). This, in other words, it is the cosmic battle between light and darkness and within that cosmic interplay of positivity and negativity, the creation exists.

Mayan

Indian

Egyptian

These myths about the interplay and intercourse of electromagnetic forces - and particularly the Enoch story in the OT - have been misinterpreted by Literalists to be real cosmic battles that took place in the heavens between the forces of good and evil. But in reality, or in shamans’ reality anyway, there are no bad spirits — no demons nor devils.

The only evil that exists in the world is invented by man — and he can just as easily dis-invent it, should he choose to. Of course, so long as he can blame it on imaginery demons, he doesn't have to change a thing.

I guess you brought it under the boat heading at the end with the commonality of the myth around the world.
I would be kind of hard to argue for independent invention at such a conceptual level.
And that would be after my first question of those who preach for independent invention in populations around the Earth of “how did those populations get there in the first place?”

A small detail; the book of Enoch did not make the cut for being in the Cannon. At least not in the Western, or Roman. I will have to check on the Eastern.

BTW
Does this mean I can use the argument that if we don't make love the sun might not come up?

Last edited by kbs2244 on Thu Oct 16, 2008 9:14 am, edited 1 time in total.

kbs2244 wrote:A small detail; the book of Enoch did not make the cut for being in the Cannon. At least not in the Western, or Roman. I will have to check on the Eastern.

Yes, I know ... but what would be interesting to know is why it didn't make the cut? Because I believe I'm right in saying (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that Enoch contains the only mention in the OT of the Devil being evil. Elsewhere, he appears in Numbers and Job as Satan, a mildly benign if not neutral force. So it looks as if the Christians based their Devil on Enoch's ... which never made the canon. Odd, don't you think?

Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.

I guess you have to the root meanings of the words ‘devil” and “satan.”
“Devil,” in Greek, means slander or false accuser.
So using it in a way as someone opposed to God would mean someone that made a false accusation against God.
That is what he did in the Garden when he told Eve he was trying to hide something from her and Adam.

“Satan” goes back a bit farther into the story.
It means “resister.”
So that name would have been applied to him at the time he decided to “resist” Gods purpose for humans and turn them to worshipping him instead.

So then, in those terms, he is mentioned as a not so nice guy in the accepted Genesis.

No argument in the allegorical aspect of Enoch though.
That may be the reason it didn’t make the cut!

First off, I believe the Garden of Eden story is a misunderstanding of the Sumerian version in which the serpent is deemed to be a wise and good teacher of wisdom to mankind.

"For the serpent was wiser than any of the animals that were in Paradise."

In the next mention of Satan in the OT, he is an obstructing angel - not obstructing or resisting God, but obstructing the road so that Balaam's ass doesn't take the wrong direction. In other words, his obstruction was to be helpful and nothing to do with resisting God or God's will. In fact, it was God's will that Satan obstruct Balaam's ass. This is all in the book of Numbers.

Satan is also portrayed as a helpful advisor to God in Job, where he makes suggestions to God about how he could test Job, and God takes on board these suggestions in the way that you would with a trusted counsellor. Again, Satan is far from going against God, but is working in partnership with him.

So where does Satan become evil? As far as I can see, only in the cosmological battle in Enoch, which is an allegory for electromagnetism, imo, in the same way that I showed with the churning of the mill allegories from Egypt, India and South America. Enoch's battle is the same story but told in a different way.

Well. You may read the story of Balaam and Job that way, but it sure is not the accepted view when you take the whole context into view.
I guess it comes under the heading of “with friends like this, who needs enemies.”

And I guess we will have to agree to disagree on the existence of evil sprits
I am a big believer in the Ying and the Yang.